Alien Surfaces

This is not the usual science fiction art. There are no airbrushed spacecraft or warrior princesses in impractical armour here. The prints in this exhibition are inspired by surfaces described in works of science fiction and fantasy, some well-known classics and others that deserve to be so. The texts were chosen from my own reading and from suggestions made by Mike Calder of Transreal Fiction and number of other friends and acquaintances (thank you, you know who you are).

Starting from the selected texts and my archive of photographic material, the work distorts real images to create semi-abstract representations of the imaginary. I have used a variety of photographic techniques, including solvent transfers and cyanotypes, to render alien planets, landscapes, buildings, skins, vegetation and artefacts. All of the work has some greater or lesser element of digital processing. Making the purely digital images is iterative – reading around the selected text, making an image, returning to the text, letting it settle in my imagination, back to the computer to adjust the image. When I’m finally happy with a test print, the full size version is printed on watercolour paper, signed and mounted.

A lot of my creative work reflects my interest in surfaces It can manifest itself in diverse ways – from tactile, textile forms exploring mathematical surfaces to macro photographs of rusting machinery. The alien surfaces which inspire this collection are not always extraterrestrial or even non-human in origin. Some are earthly but normally hidden from human awareness like Siloën in Read’s The green child. Others are man-made but have become alien through abandonment and mythopeia as in Ballard’s Hello America. The idea that the near and familiar can become alien is further reinforced by the fact that all the photographs on which this portfolio is based were taken within a few miles of my studio.

One surface in this exhibition is not a print of any sort. It is a hand knitted representation of the shape of the planet in Christopher Priest’s Inverted World – a rotation of y=1/x around the y-axis. Having studied mathematics at university this planetary surface always appealed to me. It seemed an obvious choice for the exhibition. I’ve been knitting and crocheting mathematical objects for the last few years and so it was again obvious (to me at least) that I should make it this way. I asked around a few knitting groups for patterns in case something similar had already been done. To my astonishment, a reply came back from Hugh Griffiths at the University of Edinburgh offering to run his pattern-writing algorithm on this structure. Hugh’s algorithm saved me much time in number crunching the pattern with a calculator for which I’m very grateful.

The nine digital prints are available, uneditioned and unsigned, in a variety of sizes from my Imagekind account.